Site Mobile Navigation

Judge Orders City to Stop Housing Homeless in Office

In a move that increases pressure on the city in a long-running battle over homeless policy, a judge yesterday ordered the Giuliani administration to comply with a new City Council measure aimed in part at ending overnight stays by homeless families on the floors of a city office in the Bronx.

The measure, passed last month with other shelter regulations over the Mayor's vehement opposition, requires the city to provide families with a self-contained, lockable sleeping room and a bed or a crib where appropriate while their applications for shelter are under review. It also requires the city to help families gather government documents like Social Security cards and birth certificates that they need to qualify for shelter.

The order by Justice Helen E. Freedman of State Supreme Court in Manhattan was another setback for the Giuliani administration, which since 1995 has paid $5 million in fines for forcing homeless families to sleep on the floors, desks and chairs of the Emergency Assistance Unit at 151 East 151st Street in Mott Haven, in violation of court orders. The order issued yesterday gave the city 30 days to comply before facing new sanctions.

The court order directs the city to establish criteria consistent with current standards for permanent housing for determining whether a family's possible alternative to a shelter, such as the residence of a friend or relative, is unsafe, overcrowded, or medically unsound. It also prohibits the city from denying emergency shelter to applicants without making sure that housing is actually available to them.

Compliance would require changes in procedures for admission to shelters that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani maintains are necessary to deter families from abusing the shelter system, but which advocates say shuts out homeless children and parents who have no safe alternatives.

''The advocates want us to diminish eligibility requirements, to shelter people who aren't homeless but don't want to go back to their family,'' Deputy Mayor Joseph Lhota said yesterday. ''And that's not right.''

Steven Banks, director of the Homeless Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society, said that half the families ultimately found eligible for shelter by the city had been forced to apply an average of five times. Each time, they are shuttled between the Emergency Assistance Unit, where children and their parents routinely sleep on the floor, and a 10-day temporary shelter where their eligibility is still under review.

Susan Wiviott, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeless Services, and David Goldin, a spokesman for the City Law Department, would not comment. Mr. Lhota also would not comment on the court order, but he said that to comply with the new law, the city would have to spend $8-to-$9 million to renovate the Emergency Assistance Unit, and $2 million on extra operating costs. If renovation proves to be impossible, he said, the cost of building a new shelter would be more than $21 million.

Mr. Banks dismissed both as unnecessary. The city already has plenty of family shelter beds available, he said, as well as other ways to comply with the new law.

The city, Mr. Banks said, could shift money from shelters to rent or relocation subsidies, or change the process for applying to shelters, so that families would not have to spend 16 hours in the assistance unit, which does not open until 5 P.M.

In one case last fall, a woman identified only as Maria L. attempted to commit suicide by cutting her wrists after she and her teen-age daughter were repeatedly denied shelter over a two-month period, according to Mr. Banks' affidavit.

The city, according to the filing, had insisted that the woman and her daughter had two alternatives to the shelter system: a single rented room that the woman had shared with her brother, or an apartment where the primary tenant had made sexual advances toward her daughter.

More than four years ago, the Giuliani administration agreed to the court's appointment of two mediators to oversee a reorganization of the city's system for sheltering homeless families so that children and parents would not end up sleeping in offices.

Barbara Cutler, one of the mediators, said the judge was ''trying to strike a balance between the needs of this population and the limited resources of the city, as well as the tremendous demand for shelter.'' She added: ''The city has tried. Unfortunately on many levels they have not succeeded.''

Yesterday's court order requires the mediators to monitor the city's performance for 30 days and recommend sanctions if necessary. Unless the parties agree that sanctions can be handled differently, Ms. Cutler said, the law requires fines that would go to homeless families forced to stay overnight on the floors and benches of the Emergency Assistance Unit.